NELLIE PTASCHKINA .*
Suor phrases as "personal revelation " and "human docu- ment" have very much had their edge worn off by indis- criminate use for every hysterical or posturing subjective memoir : now, when one has need of then:, they have ceased to be good coin. Here is a diary so secret that its author could not bear anyone even to know of its existence ; and yet the character it reveals is one of such a limpid sincerity, such an unmorbid power of self-analysis, that one feels no indecency in seeing it thus in cold print : there is no uneasy blush as at the wrongful discovery of something intimate.
Nellie Ptaschkina began this diary in 1914, when she was
• The Diary of Nellie Plaechkina. London Cape. [7s. 9,1.]
ten, but its earlier volumes were lost in the flight from Moscow : that portion now published was begun while she was still fourteen, and ends when she was sixteen. It covers the flight of the family from Moscow, their life at Kieff under the successive rule of Germans, Bolsheviks, and Whites. But it is not as an historical document that it is valuable, although she shows a quite amazing grasp of public affairs for her age. The girl of fifteen who, chivied from pillar to post by the Bolsheviks, seeing her adored Russia driven deeper into ruin by them, could yet recognize the visionary in Lenin, could regard the detectives and soldiers who bullied them and threatened their lives without resentment, and condemn the atrocities of the Cheka without abuse, had plainly no ordinary mind : sets a severe example to many of her elders. She read voluminously—Tolstoy, Dostoicvsky, Thiers ; of whom Tolstoy seems to have influenced her most. There appears to have been no censorship of any sort exercised over her reading ; and she makes no mention whatever of religion ; which partly account for the simplicity and directness with which she attacks every problem, from Life and Death to Prostitution. It would, of course, be absurd to suggest that she has anything very new or profound to say upon any of them ; it is rather the way she faces them that is of value : too naive to be priggish, too conscious of inner greatness to be conceited : "detached "from her family as only a child of her age can be : with the idealism of her years and a steadiness of purpose of more than her years, the sensitiveness without the hysteria. M. Svatikoff, in a short introduction, claims that the diary "wins her a place in Russian literature." It is a statement quiring some qualification ; it would be unnatural to expect it to be a great work of art : but it is a work of such pure art that its value cannot diminish with the lapse of time. It must remain the true reflection of a mind unusual rather than abnormal, astonishingly developed and yet immature : promising, in the best sense.
It ends in 1919, with her arrival at Paris. Afterwards she graduated at the Sorbonne : and she speaks in several places of her wish to finish her education at an English University. But on July 2nd, 1920, when climbing in the Alps, she put her foot on a piece of moss and fell from an enormous height into the Cascade du Dard.
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